Sunday, April 08, 2007

Easter Sunday 2007 - Poems of Brian Turner

*

The Holy Week ended. Perhaps the only good news was the release of the 15 British sailors and marines by Iran. The war in Iraq and its terrible toll (3275 U.S. soldiers and countless Iraqis dead) have become major concerns for Americans. The unjust war that our nation was conned into cries out for an end. But not going to happen. The neocons hatched the plot for war long before 9/11. Bush, Cheney and others put it into action when Americans were in shock and vulnerable. Now they will not, cannot, admit their role in the mess that they created. Many more will die.

Baghdad, of course, has become a familiar name to Americans. But other Iraqi cities in the theatre of war (Fallujah, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Balad,Bequba, Basra, Samarra among them) are not that well known. Came across poems by American soldier Brian Turner in NPR's web site.

Ashbah

The ghosts of American soldiers wander the streets of Balad by night, unsure of their way home, exhausted, the desert wind blowing trash down the narrow alleys as a voice sounds from the minaret, a soulfull call reminding them how alone they are, how lost. And the Iraqi dead, they watch in silence from rooftops as date palms line the shore in silhouette, leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

*

Najaf 1820

Camel caravans transport the dead from Persia and beyond, their bodies dried and wrapped in carpets, their dying wishes to be buried near Ali, where the first camel dragged Ali's body across the desert tied to the fate of its exhaustion.

Najaf is where the dead naturally go, where the gates of Paradise open before them in unbanded light, the blood washed clean from their bodies. It is November, the clouds made of gunpowder and rain, the earth pregnant with the dead; cemetery mounds stretching row by row with room enough yet for what the years will bring: the gravediggers need only dig, shovel by shovel.